Why our data is always our responsibility

The one thing I spend a good chunk of my day on is “the cloud”…who doesn’t? Right?

No, not using Facebook, or Gmail…reading, writing, listening to customers, talking to co-workers…trying to get an understanding of how the cloud impacts Seagate and our customers, plans, products…well, everything. I’m not about to go into details as to everything I have learned. It’s not possible in a single blog post. One major takeaway I have learned is that we, consumers and businesses alike, need to come to grips with one simple fact.

Our data is and always will be our responsibility…no matter where it is stored.

When it comes to choosing the right storage for our laptops, desktops, servers, or networks, the type of storage, performance, warranty, reliability all come into question. Why? Because ultimately, we are relying on the product to hold and protect our data, our content, our assets. Our data is our responsibility… why else would we be bombarded with backup, backup, backup messages over the past decade? In fact, the backup message alone may haven given birth to the cloud computing phenomenon we have today.

But the cloud is much more than backup. It’s evolving to become not only the storage of choice for many consumers and businesses alike, but the compute method of choice. We are not only storing our data in the cloud, we are creating our data in the cloud. We’re just moving the location from local to, well, not local. So, why have we thrown the type of storage, performance, warranty, and reliability questions we had in the past out the window? Do we really care what our data is being stored on? Do we care anymore about how fast it is, or how long it will last?

The short answer… no, but we will.

The cloud is – for lack of a better description – becoming our data center, our infrastructure, our content hub…and storage in all of its forms has never been more important. I’ll talk about this more and more, and provide some real-life examples in future posts on the cloud, so stay tuned.

Do you know what type of drive you have on your desktop? Do you know what type you have in the cloud? I do, and I don’t.